I will say again that the only logical explanation for the Bush cabal's putative 'surge' is that they don't really expect it to happen and it is intended merely as a rhetorical fulcrum to shift blame over to soft shell Democrats and those irremediable Iraqis. If one was sitting on and ultimately responsible for a situation that was doomed and offered no pain free way of escape and you considered the domestic politics ravenously circling this dire situation as the only battle now worth winning - then indeed it's not improbable, if you were a cold cunning bastard, not improbable that you'd come up with an idea like the surge.
Of course they didn't actually come up with the idea, just borrowed it, assumed it - and then proceeded to substantially gut it, to a degree apparently so cavalier and ill-advised that the chicken hawk academic who did conceive the child has renounced the creature as a bastard foundling that he can no longer recognize as his own - which adds I think credibility to my thesis.
At this point the only people who seem to support the surge are the ones who, like its chief sponsors, do so out of political calculation - which, I should add, I don't necessarily fault them for: politics is the art of lying while pretending to do otherwise [that could describe all art] and only the naive will fail to see that sometimes these lies behave so much like the truth that it can be hard to tell the two apart. What strikes me about those still supporting the surge is not the relative verity of their declamations but rather the argument cobbled together to support such, an argument which essentially boils down to an almost pathetic plea of 'might as well give it a chance'. Even if the chief sponsors had an unblemished record of successes to reference in this war 'give it a chance' would still sound so hollow as to defy recommendation - and these guys don't have any successes to point to! It astounds. Indeed, astounds so much that again I look for the sleight of hand: they use such hollow justification because they know giving it a chance is never going to get the chance to be given, thereby denying critics the chance to ever prove that it didn't have a chance to begin with, ergo it did.
If the shit hits the fan in Iraq as badly as reason would seem to dictate it will this clever little lie of theirs has the potential to look something like a truth come that fateful shit fanning day - and often that's good enough when the war one really wants to win is political.
